Approaching the True Cost of Living: The Location Affordability Portal

There is more to housing affordability than how much rent or mortgage you pay. Transportation costs are the second-biggest budget item for most families, but to date there hasn’t been an easy way for people to fully factor transportation costs into decisions about where to live and work. The goal of the soon-to-be-released Location Affordability Portal is to provide the public with reliable, user-friendly data and resources on combined housing and transportation costs to help consumers, policymakers, and developers make more informed decisions about where to live, work, and invest. This site is the result of a collaboration between the U.S. Departments of Housing and Urban Development and Department of Transportation.

The Portal will feature two cutting-edge new tools — the Location Affordability Index and My Transportation Cost Calculator—that illustrate from different perspectives how housing and transportation costs impact affordability. In addition to these decision-support tools, the Portal will provide access to supporting resources that offer a wide range of information on current research and practice aimed at understanding, and ultimately reducing, the combined housing and transportation cost burden borne by American families.